Watch climate change in action.

16/10/2010

Called catastrophe tourism by some, environmentally-motivated tourism by others, there is no doubt that warmer temperatures and melting ice are transforming once-inaccessible places into new travel destinations. The chance to experience visual evidence of the effects of global warming has created a surge of interest in cold climate spots that may soon just melt away, reports the New York Times.

Intrepid travellers can visit Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park where the aptly named Exit Glacier has retreated 1,000 feet in the last 10 years. Rangers have been given extra training to deal with the climate-change questions the Park’s increasing number of visitors have been asking over the
last couple of years.

Perhaps an easier option is to take a 'Discover the World' (www.discovertheworld.co.uk) 11-day cruise from Scotland to Norwegian Svalbard, an archipelago several hundred miles north of Scandinavia, where you can enjoy the 24-hour summer sunshine. As the summer seas have become passable the number of tourists has doubled over the last 10 years to the extent that Spitsbergen, the most popular island, has been called the Tenerife of the North. Landlubbers may prefer to opt for a Norwegian
Airlines (www.norwegian.no) flight from Oslo to Svalbard, with prices around 200 euros return.